Contents
Acknowledgements
7
Introduction
9
Foreword
13
PART ONE: LILLIPUT IN LONDON 1 Lilliput in London 2 Up the Republic! 3 Jailbirds 4 Rainbow Chasers 5 The First Round 6 On the Run 7 War
18 31 47 53 63 85 100
PART TWO: THE BODY AND THE LASH 8 Spies 9 Enter the Black and Tans 10 Realists and Dreamers 11 Bloody Sunday 12 De Valera Returns 13 Truce
112 136 161 172 185 201
PART THREE: THE TRAGIC DILEMMA 14 Treaty 15 A Rift in the Lute 16 The Great Talk
222 245 251
17 Alarms and Excursions
266
18 Civil War
19 The Shadow Falls 20 Apotheosis Index
281
290 303 313
PART ONE
LILLIPUT IN LONDON
1 Lilliput in London
One cold bright morning in the spring of the year of fate, 1916, a young man in a peaked cap and grey suit stood
on the deck of a boat returning to Ireland. He was in his
middle twenties, tall and splendidly built, with a broad, good-tempered face, brown hair and grey eyes. His eyes
were deep-set and wide apart, his nose was long and fine, his
mouth well arched, firm, curling easily to scorn or humour. One interested in the study of behaviour would have noted
instantly the extreme mobility of feature which indicated
unusual nervous energy; the slight swagger and remarkable grace which indicated an equal physical energy; the
prominent jowl which underlined the curve of the mouth; the smile which gave place so suddenly to a frown; and that appearance of having just stepped out of a cold bath
which distinguished him from his grimy fellow travellers; the uninterested would have passed him as a handsome
but otherwise ordinary young Irishman, shopman or clerk, returning from England on holiday.
It was ten years since this young man, Michael Collins,
had left his native place in West Cork. A country boy of 18
Lilliput in London
fifteen, precocious and sturdy, he had taken the train from
the little Irish town where for a year he had been put through the mysteries of competitive examination. With his new travelling bag and new suit, which included his first long
pants, he had crossed the sea and passed his first night in exile amid the roar of London.
The boat crept closer to the North Wall. He saw the
distant mountains heaped above the city, its many spires, its dingy quays. Everywhere the bells were calling to Mass. It might have been the same Dublin of years before, but
beneath it was a different Dublin and a different Ireland. Then it had been butter merchants, cattlemen, labourers who chatted with the manly youth with the broad West Cork
accent. Now it was soldiers returning on leave from the war,
some lying along the benches, their heads thrown to one side, their rifles resting beside them, while others, too excited to
rest, paced up and down the deck, glad another crossing was over without sight of the conning tower of a submarine. He
chummed up with two of them. Some time soon he felt that, instead of chatting with them, he would be fighting them.
That was the greatest change. Then there had been no talk
of fight. Mr Redmond, the leader of the Irish race at home
and abroad, hook-nosed, spineless and suave – a perfect Irish gentleman – was in Westminster and all was well with the
country. An election was being held in Galway, and there
were brass bands and blackthorns, just as in the good old
days. There was money to be made, land to be claimed, 19
The Big Fellow
position to be secured; all Irish nationalism exacted of its
ser vants was an occasional emotional reference to Emmet on the gallows, Tone with his throat cut. Parnell, whose name
the lad of fifteen, following his father, had held dear, was dead, and the intellect of Ireland had been driven into the wilderness. The few who could think were asking what was
wrong with the country and giving different answers. Some
said it had no literature (‘Literature, my bloody eye!’ chorused Lilliput indignantly, busy with increasing its bank balance
and saving its soul in the old frenzied Lilliputian way); some that it had lost its native tongue; some that Westminster
was corrupting its representatives and that they would be
better at home; some that the workers were being exploited
by Catholic and Protestant, Englishman and true Gael alike; some that the whole organisation of society was wrong and
that it was vain to increase wealth while middlemen seized it all. Against each of these doctrines Lilliput set up a howl of
execration, and the intellectuals of one movement were often the Lilliputians of another. So we find the Gaelic Leaguers
ranged against the literary men, and the abstentionists against the workers.
That movement of the intelligence, which Lilliput so
deeply resented, had taken place because at the end of the
preceding century the great Lilliputian illusion had broken
down, the belief that one man could restore its freedom to a bookless, backward, superstitious race which had scarcely emerged from the twilight of mythology. It had broken 20
Lilliput in London
down because the priests had torn Parnell from his eminence and Lilliput had assented. Sick at heart, the sensitive and
intelligent asked what it meant. None said ‘Lilliput’, none declared that Ireland was suffering for its sins, or that Lilliput must cast out the slave in its own soul. That is not
how masses change. And so arose Yeats and Hyde, Griffith, Larkin and Plunkett.
In turn each of these waves of revolt had spent itself.
Synge was dead, Larkin beaten, Griffith a name. The war
had brought Lilliput back in strength. There was nothing Lilliput liked better than a good vague cause at the world’s
end – about the Austrian succession, the temporal power or the neutrality of Belgium. Given such a cause, involving
no searching of the heart, no tragedy, it can almost believe
itself human. In proportion to its population Ireland had
contributed more to French battlefields than England itself. Lilliput did not mind if Ireland was still unfree. All in good
time. The great jellyfish of Westminster, the invertebrate leader with the hooked nose and cold, mindless face, let slip
the one great chance of winning freedom. Without firing a
shot or sending a man to the gallows he might have had it, but refrained – from delicacy of feeling. Lilliput is nothing if not delicate-minded. And now, let the war end without
war in Ireland, and all that ferment of the intelligence would
have gone for nothing. So at least the intellectuals thought, though it is doubtful if a historical process once begun ever fails for lack of occasion.
21
The Big Fellow
Michael Collins was coming back to take part in a revo-
lution which the intellectuals felt was their last kick. They were gathering in from the wilderness to which the Par-
nellite disillusionment had driven them: labourers, clerks, teachers, doctors, poets, with their antiquated rifles, their amateurish notions of warfare, their absurd, attractive scru-
ples of conscience.
It must have been thrill enough for the soul of the young
man when the ship came to rest and the gangways went down that faraway spring morning. The ten years of exile
were over. Sweet, sleepy, dreary, the Dublin quays which would soon echo with the crash of English shells. Even a
premonition of what was in store for him could scarcely have
stirred him more or the shadow of his own coming greatness; even the feeling that, his work done, the Ireland he loved set free, he himself would personify a mass possession greater
even than that Parnell had stood for, and that from his body, struck down in its glory, the intellect of the nation would pass again into the wilderness.
London of pre-war days was a curious training ground
for a man who was about to lead a revolution. The Irish in
London – except those who stray, who wish to forget their
nationality as quickly as possible – stick together, so that, in
one sense, London is only Lilliput writ large. One class, one faith, one attitude; the concerts where preposterously garbed females sing sentimental songs to the accompaniment of
the harp, boys and girls dance ‘The Walls of Limerick’ and 22
Lilliput in London
‘The Waves of Tory’ and play a variety of hurling.
But the young men of Collins’ day, however their instincts
might urge them to resurrect Lilliput in London, did not have to do so. If they did not wish to go to Mass, there was
no opinion that could make them; if they wanted to read
what in the homeland would be called ‘bad books’, there was nobody to stop them. Collins was lucky, not only in being
bundled into a big city where he did not need to grow old too
soon, but in having a sister who encouraged his studiousness. To the day of his death he remained an extraordinarily
bookish man. History, philosophy, economics, poetry; he read them all and was so quick-witted that he needed no
tutor. He went to the theatre week by week, admired Shaw and Barrie, Wilde, Yeats, Colum, Synge; knew by heart vast
tracts of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, ‘The Widow in Bye Street’, Yeats’ poems, and The Playboy.1 One cannot imagine him doing anything halfheartedly.
Most of the younger Irish, relieved of the necessity for
orthodoxy, favoured a mild agnosticism and ‘advanced’ ideas. Collins, who did nothing in moderation, went further: ‘If
there is a God, I defy him,’ he declared on one occasion. With great fire and persuasiveness he discussed such
‘advanced’ ideas as the evils of prostitution (which he was shrewd enough to know only at second-hand through the
works of Tolstoy and Shaw). Already he was being looked 1
J. M. Synge’s iconic play, The Playboy of the Western World. 23
The Big Fellow
upon as a bit of a character, a playboy, and when in that
grand West Cork accent of his he rolled out the Playboy’s superb phrases about his father’s ‘wide and windy acres of
rich Munster land’, or of being ‘abroad in Erris when Good
Friday’s by, making kisses with our wetted mouths’, of the Lord God envying him and being ‘lonesome in his golden chair’, he was Christy Mahon incarnate, who for the fiftieth
time was slaying his horrid da with a great clout that split the old man to the breeches belt.
But the old da refused to die. In fact his life had never
been in danger. When members of his hurling club debased
themselves by playing rugby, Collins was the hottest advocate of their expulsion. When a poor Irish soldier appeared among the spectators on the hurling field in uniform, Collins drove
him off. When Robinson’s Patriots was produced in London, Collins went to hoot it because Robinson dared to suggest
that the people of Cork – his Cork – preferred the cinema
to a revolutionary meeting.2 In fact Collins’ studiousness was the mental activity of a highly gifted country lad to whom
culture remained a mysterious and all-powerful magic, though not one for everyday use. His reading regularly out-
distanced his powers of reflection, and whenever we seek the source of action in him it is always in the world of his
childhood that we find it. When excited, he dropped back 2 24
Lennox Robinson was a Cork-born dramatist and poet. He later became manager of the Abbey Theatre.
Lilliput in London
into the dialect of his West Cork home, as in his dreams
he dropped back into the place itself, into memories of its fields, its little whitewashed cottages, Jimmy Santry’s forge
and the tales he heard in it. There was rarely a creature so compact of his own childhood. To literature and art the real Michael Collins brings the standards of the country fireside
of a winter night, emotion and intimacy, and that boyish
enthusiasm which makes magic of old legends and can weep
over the sorrowful fate of some obscure blacksmith or farmer. The songs he loved best were old come-all-ye’s of endless length, concerning Granuaile or the Bould Galtee Boy: Bold and gallant is my name, My name I will never deny, For love of my country I’m banished from home, And they calls me the Bould Galtee Boy.
The student in him found pleasure in Yeats; his turbulent
temperament found most satisfaction in songs like this which came out of or went back to the life from which he
had sprung; the thing of which he seems to have known nothing and cared less is the great middle-class world of
approximations and shadows. His nature safeguarded him
from the commonplace. If his pal Joe O’Reilly sang ‘Máire,
My Girl’, Collins got up and left the room impatiently. P. S. O’Hegarty quotes one of his later utterances, and one of
extraordinary significance. He made it, O’Hegarty says, with 25